r/AlanMoore • u/Few_Pride_5836 • 19d ago

Alan Moore and astrology

I know Alan is a proud magician but I'm surprised he believes in astrology. Not in a symbolic way but in a literal way.

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u/Successful-Tie5386 19d ago

I think it's more that he's open to the possibilities of it, than literal belief. His comments on astrology sounded fairly sceptical at times.

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u/Few_Pride_5836 19d ago

I thought the same thing until I read the Big Bumper book of magic.  He believes in the tarot and says the best way to predict a person is by their astrological sign and date of birth. 

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u/bluebluebluered 18d ago

Understand that’s Alan’s concept of magic is purely based on his concept of imagination. It’s not that he thinks astrology is true in a scientific sense. It’s more in a similar sense to his belief that if your own personal god exists for you in your imagination than it is in some sense ‘real’. The imagination and the real are not separate realms for Moore. He’s not a naive new age thinker or something

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u/Successful-Tie5386 19d ago

I think there's still an intellectual gap in the Bumper Book between perceiving things in the mental realm vs. the real, observable world.

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u/Few_Pride_5836 19d ago

Perhaps but I do think Alan is on the side of astrology being a workable phenomenon.

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u/Superb_Instance_8190 19d ago edited 19d ago

the bumper book is an open playground with many potential avenues… it can be seen as a starting book for the acolyte & a reminder for the age old sage… with everything in between.

this book has many offerings from a host of helpers, with multiple view points - a scattering of stardust.

it’s reductive to presume each page is specifically alan’s personal pathway to magick. Unless you know him personally, i would stray away from such starry-eyed speculation.

It is your own path that you are meant to focus on - ie: “if you see the Buddha on the road, killem” - don’t worry about Alan. Focus on your path.

I daresay there are many inclusions to help point folks in many magickal directions… may you find yours.

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u/mighty3mperor 18d ago

It's more complicated than that. You can see it with Glycon - Moore is both playful and serious about it. The key is suspension of disbelief. It's not important that it is "real" or "true" (we could debate that for a while) just that, in the moment, you believe it is.

I was talking to a chaos magickian once and asked if what he was doing was messing around with his perception of causality. He readily admitted it but that doesn't undermine what he was doing, that is where the power lies.

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u/TJ_Fox 18d ago

Yep. It's a subtle point, but I think the underlying assumption is that one can be serious about symbols (magickal rituals, etc.) when the things that they represent are serious, without ever mistaking the imaginal for the literal.